Wildlife: Ruth Padel's passionate eloquence on behalf of a noble species should shame its persecutors, writes Patrick Skene Catling.
'You've got to stop seeing me," Ruth Padel told her lover in a London wine bar one St Lucy's Day, the shortest, gloomiest day of the year. Thus she ended a five-year relationship - not living together but sometimes travelling together, sometimes seeing each other only twice a week. After what she calls their "magically happy" trip to New Orleans, he had returned home to find his family upset. Of her sacrificial act of repudiation, she writes: "His Christmas present: life without me for ever."
Padel is a poet, chair of the UK's Poetry Society, an acutely imaginative postmodernist, who finds apt metaphorical likenesses in dissimilarities. In the title poem of The Soho Leopard (Chatto & Windus, 2004), she presents Beauty and the Beast as exemplars of her own dilemma: should Beauty give up her life to save Beast from his false self-image and the imprisonment of mother fixation? Hell, no.
"Beauty escaped. She did it for his sake/ (He was torn in two, and holding him/ Was trying to lullaby an earthquake),/ But also, if she's honest, for her own," she writes. Padel certainly seems willing to be honest.
Having forsworn a vain, weak man who hid behind a mask, she escaped from disillusionment with the help of Go A Way, a travel agency that sent her to India on a package holiday. As Darwin's great-great-granddaughter and a fellow of the Zoological Society of London, she was inspired by biology as well as poetry, but her aesthetic sensibility was evidently the prime mover. The book's first appendix cites relevant poems by Donne, Borges, Blake and others, including Wallace Stevens, from whom she got her ominous title: ". . . an old sailor,/ Drunk and asleep in his boots,/ Catches tigers/ In red weather."
She was now in love with an epitome of power, courage, independence, loneliness and doom: the tiger. Tigers in Red Weather is romantically tragic non- fiction, a passionate work of poetical epiphanies and angry polemic that reads like an autobiographical novel of rare candour. She may not be able to save the world's rapidly dwindling wildernesses and endangered few tigers, but she states their ecological case with an eloquence that should make a lot of people embarrassed.
Tigers need a protective habitat with sufficient water and prey. Ignorant, indifferent and dishonest bureaucrats, foresters and gamekeepers are allowing the degradation of jungle and rainforest reserves and the culling of tigers that need them for survival. When the bribes are right, illicit roads are built and trees illicitly felled, enabling poachers to kill tigers for their valuable skins (£5,500 each on the international wildlife black market) and their bones, which are much in demand, especially in China, for spurious medical use. There is a high price even for tiger- penis soup, which some Asians believe is an aphrodisiac. Padel has written a poem called The Forest, the Corrupt Official and a Bowl of Penis Soup.
"Traditional medicine is still the primary health care in many south-east Asian countries," Padel writes. "Over a fifth of the world's population believes that swallowing ground tiger bone cures muscle pain, epilepsy, piles. Kellogs-and-Esso symbolism, Asian style . . . Tigers pay a heavy price for their role in human fantasy. They are a casualty of symbolism." The species Panthera tigris, numbered now only in hundreds, is close to extinction except in captivity.
In the course of two years' research and exploration, the poet/ conservationist seems to have learned everything there is to know about tigers. In search of them, she has visited the countries where they still live in the wild - India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Russia, Korea, China, Tibet, Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia and Indonesia - and has met many administrators who are supposed to enforce protectionist laws, and some men and women who really do their best to do so.
Her travels have been arduous, by kayak over rapids, through "Arthur Rackham forest" and "Rousseau jungle" and across mountains. She has been disgusted by leeches and frightened by snakes.
"It is a basic principle of being a peacock that where you are is better without cobras," she writes. With a painterly eye, she observes marvellous colours everywhere, and none comes straight out of the tube - tangerine, pewter, violet, emerald, cappuccino . . .
Her prose is rich in comparisons: "With a flapping like someone hanging out washing, a heron landed with wide wings, legs scoring the water's skin"; "the air smelt of hay and crème brûlée".
There are excellent maps and lists of charities that relay donations to help tigers. By the end of her account, I was almost convinced that the tiger is Nature's supreme creation, much nicer than you and I. But as I read the statistics of its decline I imagined the sighs of relief of innumerable deer.
Patrick Skene Catling is an author and critic
Tigers in Red Weather. By Ruth Padel, Little, Brown, 429pp. £17.99